Apologetics II: Evolution of the iPhone?
iphone Deutsch: iphone (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
“The heavens declare the glory of God” is a nice Bible verse for a sunset on the beach or a photo of a star-lit night (Psalm 19:1). But doesn’t this verse also suggest that God makes Himself known throughout all creation?
Consider how fortunate we are to live on Earth; our placement in the solar system means we are close enough to the Sun that it remains warm enough to sustain life, but far enough away that we don’t melt from daylight. The planet’s tilted axis not only allows for four beautiful seasons (or two if you’re from Cleveland), but also signals hibernation and migratory habits of thousands of species of animals. Earth’s liquid alloy outer core creates a magnetic field that allows just the right amount of the Sun’s radiation in to heat the planet but repels the harmful radiation that would fry its inhabitants, not to mention it’s useful navigational purposes.
Or consider gravity. If this force was too strong, galaxies and stars would be smaller and closer together, increasing chances of interstellar collisions, obviously threatening any ‘chances’ for developing sustainable life. Yet, if gravity was too weak, galaxies, stars, and planets would have never formed at all.
Or we could scale it down a bit and just contemplate a human cell. Each of our cells contains six feet of organically stored information in our DNA strands. Some might say, “that’s not that impressive, we have computers that can store way more than that.” But even our most advanced technology cannot regenerate or replicate itself. We cannot even create one cell with all of our knowledge, yet the human body contains millions, and every cell knows what part it plays.
What I may or may not be successfully demonstrating here is that everything from the structure of a tiny cell up to the forces that govern the physics in universe have a specific purpose. Their constitution suggests that the universe and life inside it were not the product of random explosions or some lightning-struck primordial goo that transformed into a complex self-aware creature, but that an intelligent designer constructed everything with intent. Even the head cheerleader of the skeptics, Richard Dawkins, acknowledged this when he defined biology as, “the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.”
Defending the faith by illustrating the complexity of the universe is called the “teleological argument.” Here’s an example I’ve stolen (and modified) from William Paley:
Suppose you were walking along a deserted island when all of the sudden you stumble across an iPhone. You pick it up, notice it is a piece of machinery perfectly crafted to allow you to take photos, play music, tell time, check the news, play games, and it connects you to other people so you don’t have to talk to a volleyball with a bloody handprint on it.
Would it be logical for you to assume that the telephone was the result of billions of years of sand and rocks being exposed to the elements in such a way that it formed into this intricate piece of technology? Or, would it be logical to assume that the phone had a designer? Likewise, it is logical for us to examine anything in the universe, see it’s complexities and particular structure and conclude it, and we, have a designer.
Not only does this argument suggest we have a creator, but it also implies that He is a personal one. You can’t accidentally design an iPhone. It takes years of study, planning, and attention to detail in order to develop something with a purpose. An inventor with such dedication has an affinity for his creation and wants recognition for his accomplishments and indeed deserves them. How much more must our Creator love us and deserves our adoration.
So, next time you gaze up at the the heavens, remember that like the stars, telephones, and the rest of creation, we too should proclaim our Creator’s glory.
the renewed way 
Please look at the known map of the universe, recognize galaxy clusters for what they are and then write another beautiful prose.
gsitz
May 15, 2012
What?
therenewedway
May 15, 2012
IMO, you should visit this page http://www.atlasoftheuniverse.com/universe.html read the text with quantities, especially stars, locate our galaxy and expound upon how he is personal, views us in high regard and there is a designed plan for humanity.
gsitz
May 15, 2012
Unfortunately your arguments really don’t stand up to any scrutiny. For example, you say the seasons fit the migration habits of animals but the animals are forced to migrate because of the seasons caused by the Earth’s tilt. You have the argument around the wrong way!
You say the temperature is just right but that’s because species have adapted to live in the conditions we currently have. Again your argument is a reversed form of reality.
If conditions had been a bit different than they are then slightly different species would have evolved. If they had been a lot different then life might not have ever started on Earth, but there are many other planets where the conditions would be right for life.
I think that the argument of design is also invalid. Life is designed but not by a god. It is designed by a process called evolution. So the indications of design in a certain way (rather haphazard, full of bad design features, and with plenty of failures) is exactly what we would expect from evolution. But it certainly isn’t what we would expect from a god, is it?
I also appreciate the glory of the universe but I don’t feel the need to cheapen it by resorting to primitive fairy stories to explain what I see. Reality is so much better!
ojb42
June 20, 2012
Unfortunately your argument is again flawed in definition. Evolution, by definition, cannot design anything but is instead a random process, not a being that can ‘design.’
Though you are treating it as law, evolution does remain a theory (which again is by definition unproven), and is weak at best. We would expect fossil records to go from single celled organism to increasingly complex to where we are today, yet that is not what fossils show (instead, we have the Cambrian Explosion). There is no evidence for change from one species to another as Darwin’s theory requires, only evidence of change within species (which we already knew thousands of years before Darwin). Evolution allows for no objective truth (there goes your ‘glory’), no moral framework, and no free will. Furthermore, it speaks nothing to the origin of life, or the universe for that matter, leaving some pretty big question marks.
The point is that too many factors for the delicate balance of life need to be just right for it to be entirely random. If I threw down Scrabble letters on the floor enough times, it could spell out a sentence eventually, in theory. But if you saw such a sentence, wouldn’t you ‘logically’ conclude I intentionally spelled out the words? How much more complex is a single cell than a sentence? And the Theory of Evolution would have us believe the blocks appeared on their own and then scrambled themselves into a sentence. Forgive me if I find this ‘mythical.’
therenewedway
June 20, 2012
Fearing that science was aggrandizing itself only to war on God, the timid repudiated it. Only later did the better minds understand that the faith fears no learning; that historic criticism can be independent and impartial without becoming irreligious.
Not knowing something (the origin of life, or the universe for that matter, leaving some pretty big question marks) doesn’t mean you have to make it up, you just don’t know the answers, yet. Its OK, there are many more unknowns to be found. Remember, the earth was flat. Requiring ‘glory’ ‘moral framework’ and ‘free will’ to prove existence or that of an all knowing god is a human trait, and not having those traits as evolution would dictate, makes humans feel small. Beyond that, and its just you, using your own judgement without the biased hypocrisy surrounding everything underlined in red. Yet many small minded people cannot cope with this understanding and become unstable. Hence a moral building block called religion is required to bring a modicum of communal well being and individual worth. Many gods and many religions have come and gone, but the coalescing string is that humans in general need something beyond themselves to believe in to rationalize that their existence is worth more than that of a mouse.
Many scientists are searching frantically for god, they want to know if their existence is more than a minuscule link in an evolutionary chain, they want to feel important. But the difference is, they are looking for factual data while questioning current trends of thought and not assuming anything but proven facts as their beginning point. Postulating unconventional theories is not wrong unless proven wrong, and, considering the recent undersea findings around vents, there are more ways to create life than just the primordial ooze, which has been created in a few labs. The single cell prokaryotes evolving from this primordial soup some 3.8 billion yeas ago and symbiotically came together evolving into stromatolites (a few are still around in Australia), which proceeded to kill itself off by producing oxygen as a byproduct and causing another evolutionary shift to an oxygen rich environment with a different type of photosynthesis is not, vuala, here is a complete cell. You have to admit, the primordial ooze idea is a bit easier to swallow than 7 days, brush the dust off and here we go.
The world is flat, the planets and stars revolve around us, etc., etc. etc., why keep making the same mistakes over and over again?
Anyways, here is another recent find you can use against evolution,
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/evolution/7550033/Missing-link-between-man-and-apes-found.html
gsitz
June 21, 2012
No one who knows anything about science thinks evolution is just a random process. Some aspects of it involve random change but it is false to say that the process itself is random. And of course it can design just like many natural processes design. You really need to do some research before making comments like this.
You also need to do some research on the scientific meaning of the word “theory”. Your comments make it very obvious you think a scientific theory is just an idea like the more common meaning of the word. That is not true.
There is piles of evidence of species changing from one to another. Not only is there the fossil record but there is the DNA evidence. Either would be sufficient, together they cannot be denied – not by anyone who is interested int the truth anyway.
Let’s use your Scrabble analogy in the way evolution really works. Imagine a billion scrabble sets all being scrambled at once. Then imagine a process which takes the best patterns and keeps them then repeats the scrambling process. Now imagine this process repeating for billions of years. It would be impossible for complex patterns *not* to appear, don’t you think?
ojb42
June 22, 2012
Great response obj42. I was hoping therenewedway would figure this out, that’s why the link to a map of the known universe, but looking deeper than ones own existence without support from imaginarium is beyond most religions and their followers abilities so far. At least the Hindu’s start from the stars and work their way inward, so there is hope, just not much for the Americas where people are so arrogant as to presume they know and talk to ‘god’. Anyways, isn’t his name Anu or Zeus?
gsitz
June 20, 2012
There’s a partial list of transitional fossils here…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_transitional_fossils
Transitional fossils are fossils of species which show where one type (species or higher) of life evolved into another.
ojb42
June 22, 2012
Darwin theorized species are modified through the process of natural selection in which genes randomly mutate and that over time, these mutations that benefit the species become more pronounced until an entirely new species comes about.
A design needs a designer, which you argue there isn’t.
Though I doubt you are genuinely interested in my opinions on evolution, you can find them here (so I don’t have to hash them all out now): https://therenewedway.wordpress.com/2012/01/29/adapting-evolution/
Transitional fossils are based on the idea of homology (so we’re clear, the definition I use is similarity in species due to common decent). There must first be evidence for common ancestry before bone structures can be call homologous. It is circular reasoning to use homology as evidence for common decent, when that is what you are trying to prove in the first place.
Scrabble analogy: where did the pieces come from? Where did the energy that scrabbles them come from? What determines what is ‘best’? As I understand, the odds of proteins coming together under the right circumstances to create an amino acid are almost zero – much less a living cell (which we still can’t create despite knowing the proteins to make one). It would appear something else is needed…
Again, I don’t see this debate going anywhere, but I wish you the best.
therenewedway
June 22, 2012